Wednesday, September 02, 2009

For perhaps the majority of people, property rights are based on an unquestioned and obvious truth: if I buy something, make it or grow it, it's mine - be it a shirt, a house, a shovel or a carrot. Intuitions like this are not always reliable or easily defended, but that is how most people, in my experience, see things.

Some property rights are less clear to the intuition; few file sharers regard themselves as thieves. Chris Dillow discussed file sharing in a recent post, concluding:

There are a vast number of ways in which property rights are severely limited. To take an example from the music industry, the Licensing Act, in effect, limits the ability of new acts to perform in small venues, thus limiting their opportunities to earn money from their talent. It’s rather odd that a government that supports this restriction upon musicians should be so keen to defend their “rights” in other ways*.Now, these considerations don’t suffice to refute the claim that musicians’ rights over their music are so extensive as to debar file-sharing. What they do, show, though, is defending such rights requires one to either argue for many changes in the law, or to show that there’s something special about those rights.None of this is to defend large-scale file-sharing. In a free society, many things are morally or aesthetically deplorable but not illegal. One could argue that file-sharing falls into this category. We could say to the file downloader: “don’t you think you should instead give the artist some money for creating that song?” without asserting that the artist should have a full legal right to the money.* Actually, it’s not odd at all. The principle is that government does what big business wants, but not what smaller businesses want.

It's possible to consider the charging of rent for artistic performances to be a temporary stage we passed through as recorded media became available, and that we're moving back towards the situation that pre-dated that, in which performers were paid for performances.

But I was struck by Norman Geras's discussion of one point Chris raised:

Talking about property rights, Chris refers to one common justification for property: namely, that 'creating something generates rights over it'. There's no doubt that it's a widely shared moral intuition. If I fashion an old piece of wood into an intricate sculpture, whose should the sculpture be but mine? If you spend long days writing a literary masterpiece, are you not a proper beneficiary of its publication and sale?

What is less clear is why we think the creation of the object generates an entitlement on the part of its creator.

Expanding on this, in his final paragraph, Norm makes what I see as the founding error of Marxist thought: the imposition of agency where none exists, followed by the assumption that this agency should be directed.

Scepticism towards the moral robustness of an affirmative answer to these questions, of property rights resting on an entitlement to the 'fruits of one's labour', may suggest that the real principle at work is, rather, one of reward-for-effort[1]. I made the sculpture and it cost me time and energy to do so - that's why it's mine[2]... However, once ownership is to be decided[3] on the basis of desert[2], things become more complicated. For there are different bases of desert than merely effort, and there are other reasons for assigning things to people than merely desert - need being one of these. And should two people who have to expend different amounts of effort to achieve the same result be rewarded differently?[4]

1. The idea that the consequence of some effort is a "reward" for it is unfounded. The consequence of the effort is just that, a consequence. That an apple hits the ground if I drop it is not a reward for letting it go. The word "reward" suggests an external agency providing the sculptor with a compensation for his effort. This isn't what happens, though. A consequence of moulding clay is that the clay winds up moulded. Nothing intercedes to reward the person with clay under their nails with the final shape of the material. It would be more meaningful to ask whether the clay was the sculptor's to mess with in the first place. Maybe they dug it up - in which case the lump of clay would not have been a "reward" for digging, but again the consequence of doing so.

2. Sticking with Norm's argument, he then suggests that the artist gets this "reward" because they "deserve" it. This is a pure invention, they wind up with it because it's the consequence of the actions they took. However, this then opens the way to argue that...

3. Since the "reward" the sculptor gets is "decided" by some unidentified agent on the basis of merit (desert)...

4. These decisions of reward allocation could take into account the fact that people have differing abilities. Maybe, it could follow, students of a pottery class should line up their creations at the end of a session, then see them handed out on the basis that the best ceramic should go to the person who worked hardest, not the one who made it.

This argument only works, to the extent it appears to do so, because an external agency has been inserted into the proceedings, the quality of choice has been attributed to them, it has been argued that this choice could be exercised differently, and then a notion of fairness used to guide such choices. This notion of fairness is also completely arbitrary. Once you depart from the idea that it is fair that someone experience the consequence of their actions, you can just make it up as you go along. Most people who make these kinds of arguments wind up suggesting that their view of how things should be allocated is based on morality, but this is "morality" in the sense of "my opinion is so important I'm going to use a word that suggests it's an eternal truth".

That's not to say that the issue of whether the sculptor owned the clay in the first place isn't important. It is, to every side of the debate except the purely anarchist. A fierce defender of property rights would want to know the clay wasn't dug up from somebody else's land, without their permission. A Marxist might argue that one person taking that piece of clay deprives others of the right to take it themselves.

The latter is trivially true and unavoidable. If I eat a carrot I deprive others of the right to eat it. Without such deprivation, neither I nor the others, similarly depriving me of carrots, could live. If I use a piece of wood to build a house, I deprive others of the right to use it. I deprive others of the right to use the land I build the house on. If we didn't all do that, none of us would have shelter.

The defender of private property has an easier argument. The wood isn't zero sum, we can all plant trees. The land is zero sum, but there's enough to go round and it's rationed, rationally, by price. The potter needs a start, but once they have it they can make pots, sell them and in time buy some land. Inheritance fits badly into this argument, but that's another subject.

I haven't yet seen a Marxist argument against private property that does not rest on the logically fallacious imposition of agency where there is none and desert where there is only consequence.

But there's a stronger argument in favour of private property, for me. Well, two stronger arguments, both pragmatic. Private property works. It has delivered extraordinary gains in well-being for every human alive. Only where property rights are abrogated, in countries with arbitrary and corrupt governments, do people languish in genuine, as opposed to relative, poverty.

But most importantly of all, every time there has been an attempt to radically impose the imaginary agency of reward for effort, there has been genuine horror: totalitarianism, oppression, secret police, prison camps. And I can't really care how well motivated a philosophy is, expounded from the warmth of a private property-owning democracy. If that's been the consequence of your philosophy, then it's plain wrong, morally. And that's from a morality based on the avoidance of known causes of extreme human suffering.

UPDATE: Norm has responded to this post. I accept he was "posing a number of questions" rather than making a firm argument for one conclusion, but the issue of agency I wrote about above often appears in discussions of property rights and I took his post as a convenient hook from which to hang my discussion. I didn't mean to imply that Norm himself argues for totalitarian ends, because he doesn't. At least, I've never seen him do so.

I do say you should be entitled to "own what your actions have brought about as a consequence". The reasons I give are pragmatic. The first argues that acknowledging this ownership gives good outcomes. The second offers a watered-down version of utilitarianism: rather than seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, I recommend avoiding known causes of extreme harm. Both could be offered as a basis for morality, just as utilitarianism (also based on outcomes) was by Mill. If that is accepted, then we do have a moral case for the ownership of the consequences of our actions.

This is one problem with moral arguments; we have no commonly accepted principles on which morality is based, against which propositions can be tested.

I expect some would react to that by thinking of the plight of the least well off, in a society with absolute property rights and no form of redistribution. But redistribution to the needy does not have to be seen as based on the questioning of property rights. It can be advocated as a humanitarian, rather than egalitarian, policy.

"The idea that the consequence of some effort is a "reward" for it is unfounded. The consequence of the effort is just that, a consequence. That an apple hits the ground if I drop it is not a reward for letting it go. The word "reward" suggests an external agency providing the sculptor with a compensation for his effort. This isn't what happens, though. A consequence of moulding clay is that the clay winds up moulded. Nothing intercedes to reward the person with clay under their nails with the final shape of the material. It would be more meaningful to ask whether the clay was the sculptor's to mess with in the first place. Maybe they dug it up - in which case the lump of clay would not have been a "reward" for digging, but again the consequence of doing so."

From where I'm standing this looks a bit...blind.

Of course there's an external force that gives the owner a reward. That force is everybody else.

If everybody else is not involved, and there's just one person, then everything is as direct as you say. But then all talk of rights or ownership is beside the point.

If there are other people, then while the maker 'having' their product (in their hands, in their room, whatever) is a direct physical consequence of their effort, that also has nothing to do with 'ownership'.

Ownership means that everybody else doesn't take that product away or destroy it (or that they "shouldn't").

That's not a 'consequence' of the maker making it, that's a consequence of other people, as a group of individually, choosing to recognise a moral/legal claim.

Which is very naturally treated as a decision to 'reward'.

Your analysis suggests that once I have made my pot, as a simple natural consequence, it is then magically bound to my soul and will fight off anybody else trying to use it without my permission.

Alderson, it follows from your argument that there are no natural rights at all, merely those things that society has agreed to recognise or protect. That's certainly arguable (though I think it's quite incorrect*). However, then to say simply that it is "very natural" to call this recognition a "reward" is simply begging the question, a straightforward logical fallacy. I disagree, and you've made no attempt to show why it's "natural" to call this a "reward", merely implicitly asserted that it is.

It doesn't strengthen the fallacy to talk about things being "bound to my soul" in, I assume, an attempt to reduce to the absurd - nothing of the kind is implicit in anything I wrote.

Whether or not there is a case for natural property rights, we'd need societal enforcement. Different societies have enforced different rights, so when talking about whether there's an absolute moral right to property, this gets us nowhere.

*It's easy to see what rights we have naturally, and you touch on this in your comment. They are the rights we have when isolated: to life (more properly, not to be killed), to free speech, to property and so on; not to housing or income or health care. Society does not give us these rights, it recogises and protects them to varying degrees.

1) the origin and basis of a right involves other people - i.e. it's up to 'society' to decide what rights people have.

2) the content of a right involves other people - i.e. it is intrinsically a right to have others act in a certain way.

Neither of us is arguing for the first, but the second seems quite obvious. A tornado that tears up your house and kills you hasn't violated your rights. Nor does tuberculosis.

So my point is just that the phrase "I (by nature or Divine Law) have the right to own X" is equivalent to "other peoople (by reason of nature of Divine Law) should not use, damage, or destroy X without my permission or interfere with my use of it".

You think that sort of right exists, I don't. But you do contradict, and suggest the absurdity I mentioned, by offering analogies like

"That an apple hits the ground if I drop it is not a reward for letting it go."

"Maybe they dug it up - in which case the lump of clay would not have been a "reward" for digging, but again the consequence of doing so."

But for my digging clay to produce an obligation on other people to treat me and the clay in a certain way is entirely unlike this, in that it does involve those people's agency.

Saying that they choose doesn't mean they choose arbitrarily.They might choose rightly or wrongly. But they're making a choice and thinking about values and obligations, not about physical causation.

So they can ask 'why should digging up clay produce certain obligations?' and one very natural answer is 'they deserve it as a reward'. You may think it's wrong but there's no 'imaginary' agency invoked.

as an illustration, you offer, as against the 'arbitrary' rules of desert or merit, the supposedly simple and robust idea that "people should receive the consequences of their efforts".

That means nothing. If I see that someone has made a beautiful pot and decide to kill them and take it, they in dying are "receiving the consequences of their efforts", since the consequences turned out to be me killing them. Equally if the consequences turn out to be them getting married, or catching smallpox, or being slapped in the face.

No, there are more than two. Another is that there are some natural (negative) rights - the right not to be stopped talking, not to be killed by another person, etc - and these are upheld, suppressed or ignored by society, depending on the society.

Another thesis involves "positive" rights - the right to housing, for example - that impose an obligation on others. Societies sometimes uphold these and sometimes they don't. That's similar to your thesis number 2.

I certainly do think that rights of the type "I have a right not to be murdered by another person" exist, and that such rights are natural. I'm not the only person who thinks that; the drafters of the UN Declaration of Human Rights did, as did those who wrote the American Declaration of Independence. I'm not pulling this out of thin air.

You can attribute such rights to God if you like, but you don't have to. It's perfectly arguable that they are "natural" in that these negative rights do exist if you isolate a person, on a desert island, for example.

If we're going to use the word "agency" to describe the requirements these types of rights impose on other people, the word has different meanings for the different types of rights. In the case of negative rights, it's an imposition of inaction, not to kill, not to steal. In the case of positive rights, it's an imposition of action, to pay for another person's housing, or health care. On the one hand there's a limitation of action, on the other an enforcement of action. These are quite different and can be treated differently. That means that using the one word "agency" to describe both is potentially misleading.

When you said I'm "talking about natural consequences that don't involve any human agency" you were referring to two examples, one of which (digging) plainly does involve human agency. In fact, both examples did, the other was of a human dropping an apple. What they don't involve is any third party agency.

The question of what reasonably constitutes a consequence of an action is well-rehearsed elsewhere. If I draw a picture, the existence of the picture is the direct consequence. If you hate the picture so much you want to kill me, and you try to do so, is that also a consequence of my actions? Homicidal Islamists argued so in the case of the Danish Mohammed cartoons. I think they were wrong to do so, their attitude was not a consequence of the act of drawing, but rather of the existence of a homicidal interpretation of a religion. In every case, drawing produces a picture. In every case, homicidal doctrines produce homicidal intentions. But drawing does not produce these in every case.

So it's not a valid use of the word "consequence" to describe the responses of third parties.

To get back to my original argument, the form of words Norm used did suggest the existence of an agency that intercedes between the act of creation and the created object, and that has the power to decide to award the created object to the creator. This is a separate question as to that of whether or not society subsequently chooses to recognise this ownership. And it is incorrect - there is no such agency.

You mentioned, e.g., "a right not to be killed by another person". I spoke generally of "a right to have others act in a certain way". The former is an example of the latter.

"such rights are natural. I'm not the only person who thinks that; the drafters of the UN Declaration of Human Rights did"Yeah so do I.

But the crux of the argument is

"If we're going to use the word "agency" to describe the requirements these types of rights impose on other people, the word has different meanings for the different types of rights. In the case of negative rights, it's an imposition of inaction, not to kill, not to steal. In the case of positive rights, it's an imposition of action, to pay for another person's housing, or health care. On the one hand there's a limitation of action, on the other an enforcement of action. These are quite different and can be treated differently. That means that using the one word "agency" to describe both is potentially misleading."

The word 'agency' has a shared meaning for both: a third party consciously perceives the situation, deliberates about how to act, makes a decision, and acts.

We can tell that it has a shared meaning by the fact that the same sorts of questions are relevant: what was the motive for helping/not harm? how much difference did it make? was the decision right or wrong?

And, in particular, 'how could we justify choosing in a certain way if the third party asked us?'

"the form of words Norm used did suggest the existence of an agency that intercedes between the act of creation and the created object"

But that would be a crazy thing to imply. Why not assume that he was actually implying the existence of an agency that intercedes between the act of creation and the creator's moral claims to the created object being respected by others?

That's an interpretation which makes sense of the suggestion and is not crazy, because such an agency does exist. I'd think it was also obvious.

You argue that inaction and action are the same thing. That being the case, I can't really add to the discussion.

Instead, since I perceive the need to buy some milk, I'll go to the shop. I'll perceive the need not to kill any of the people I meet, and act on that - once I figure out what acting on that involves. While I'm figuring that out, I'll take no action, though that is presumably the same thing as taking action, so doesn't help. Hopefully, they'll understand.

If they don't, I'm afraid I won't be able to explain it to them. No matter, I'll be so busy taking action (or is that inaction?) about all the things I'm not going to do, that I wouldn't have time to explain anyway.